The present invention relates to a method and device for determining vehicle lane changes using a vehicle heading, for example as determined by global satellite positioning device, and a road heading, for example a road heading from a digital road map.
GPS devices for vehicles can provide position information as well as vehicle direction information. The vehicle direction information, also called vehicle heading information, also can be derived by a processor on the vehicle from the stream of GPS position information.
Digital road maps, also called street maps, provide all types of digital information on roads, such as streets and highways, such as their physical coordinates and whether the roads are one-way or not. The direction, i.e. heading, of a road at any location thus may be known from the digital road map information.
Christopher K. H. Wilson, Seth Rogers, and Shawn Weisenburger, in “The Potential of Precision Maps in Intelligent Vehicles”, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Vehicles, pages 419–422, October 1998, describe a method for adding lane information to digital road maps using a differential GPS device. This article is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
In “Learning to Predict Lane Occupancy Using GPS and Digital Maps” by Seth Rogers, Pat Langley, Christopher Wilson published by the DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology Center, 1510 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto. Calif. 94304-1135, the authors describe recognizing when a vehicle changes lanes based on the position of a GPS receiver with respect to a lane boundary. This article is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
“Mining GPS Data to Augment Road Models” by Seth Rogers, Pat Langley, Christopher Wilson” from 1999, published by the DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology Center, 1510 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto. Calif. 94304-1135, U.S. Pat. No. 6,502,033, European Patent Application No. 0 598 518, and Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11304512 A, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein, describe other prior art.
To determine a lane change by a vehicle, on-board cameras and image processing have been known to detect lane boundaries and crossing of the boundaries. The use of turn signal indicators to indicate a lane change is also known.